Committee Chair Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee Parliament House CANBERRA ACT 2600
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Committee Chair Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee Parliament House CANBERRA ACT 2600 By email: [email protected] 23 October 2020 Dear Committee Chair Submission to the Inquiry into the Social Security (Administration) Amendment (Continuation of Cashless Welfare) Bill 2020 Change the Record is Australia’s only national Aboriginal led justice coalition of legal, health and family violence prevention experts. Our mission is to end the incarceration of, and family violence against, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. We are comprised of the following member organisations: ANTaR, Amnesty International, ACOSS, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Australian Human Rights Commission, Federation of Community Legal Centres (VIC), First Peoples Disability Network (Australia), Human Rights Law Centre, Law Council of Australia, National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations, National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services, National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women's Alliance, National Association of Community Legal Centres, National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples, National Family Violence Prevention Legal Services Forum, Oxfam Australia, Reconciliation Australia, SNAICC - National Voice for Our Children and Victorian Commissioner for Aboriginal Children and Young People. Our opposition to the continuation of the Cashless Welfare Card Change the Record is firmly opposed to the continuation of the cashless welfare card. To ‘change the record’, and to close the gap, there must be a genuine commitment to working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to develop solutions and strategies which are evidence-based, culturally sound and community-led. The Cashless Welfare Card is the antithesis to these principles. There are a wide range of reasons to oppose the continuation of the Cashless Welfare Card - the infringement on people's’ basic, human rights; the invasion of privacy; the practical difficulties using the card; the stress and shame associated with its use etc. We refer to the extensive evidence that has already been put before the parliament by Aboriginal controlled community organisations, Aboriginal Legal Services and NATSILs, Aboriginal health organisations and academics that details these negative impacts. This submission will focus specifically on the impacts of the Cashless Welfare Card on the drivers of crime and family violence. Poverty, multi-generational disadvantage, racist and discriminatory policies and treatment and intergenerational trauma mean Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system, and experience family violence at disproportionate rates. The Cashless Welfare Card purports to respond to this devastating and unacceptable disparity in our community. Instead, the evidence shows that it continues Australia’s long legacy of discriminatory and paternalistic policy-making, has had little or detrimental impact on crime levels and in some places has seen a rise in instances of family violence.1 Lack of evidence The Cashless Welfare Card purports to have the objectives of “reducing immediate hardship and deprivation, reducing violence and harm, encouraging socially responsible behaviour, and reducing the likelihood that welfare recipients will remain on welfare and out of the workforce for extended periods.”2 There is no evidence that it achieves these objectives, and considerable evidence that it does the opposite. A study of Compulsory Income Management in greater Shepparton and Playford published this year found “little change” in “the significant ongoing impact of drug and alcohol use in their communities” since the introduction of the Cashless Welfare Card. Participants were clear that the scheme was poorly targeted, and that “methods to circumvent the restrictions of the Basics Card were well known”3 to participants suffering from addictions or misusing alcohol or other substances. It is well-known, and well documented, that drug and alcohol misuse is a key driver of people into the criminal justice system. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) has found on multiple occasions4 that that the health of Australia’s prisoners is significantly and 1 Luke Henriques-Gomes, ‘Cashless Debit Card fails to reduce family violence rates in Kimberley towns’ The Guardian 19 February 2020 https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/feb/19/cashless-debit- card-fails-to-reduce-family-violence-rates-in-kimberley-towns 2 Commonwealth, Parliamentary Debates, House, Second Reading Speech, 25 July 2019 p 990 3 Philip Mendes , Steven , Roche , Greg Marston , Michelle Peterie , Zoe Staines & Louise Humpage (2020): The Social Harms Outweigh the Benefits: A Study of Compulsory Income Management in Greater Shepparton and Playford, Australian Social Work, p 11 4 Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Web Report, ‘ Alcohol, tobacco & other drugs in Australia’ 11 September 2020, accessed: https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/alcohol/alcohol-tobacco-other-drugs- disproportionately affected by the use of alcohol and other drugs.5 Policy interventions such as the Cashless Welfare Card which restrict autonomy, choice and dignity; but fail to address underlying mental health, addiction and health complications; have a long history in failed top- down government interventions which ultimately fail the communities upon whom they are imposed. Similarly, there has been little change in unemployment figures in trial sites. The availability (or lack therefore) of jobs is the key determinant of reliance on social security payments, and without interventions to address job shortages, the Cashless Welfare Card has been found to do little to address peoples’ reliance on welfare. A clear example of this is the site of Hinkler which “has higher rates of unemployment and a larger proportion of people not in the labour force than the average for the rest of Queensland and all Australia” and almost half of its population is in “the lowest decile on the Index of relative socio-economic disadvantage.”6 Given the high unemployment in the region, and high level of poverty, it is difficult to see how quarantining income is likely to be an effective response to these systemic issues. Further, Change the Record is extremely concerned about the punitive impacts of the Cashless Welfare Card given the current unemployment crisis during Covid-19; and the even greater pressure the scheme will place on unemployed participants who have no realistic prospect of gaining employment in the current climate and economic recession. We released a report earlier this year called Critical Condition7 which documented the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 policies on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The Cashless Welfare Card already targets Indigenous communities. It is our fear that an already discriminatory scheme will have an even greater deleterious impact on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the context of the global pandemic and Covid-19 restrictions. Perpetuation of poverty Decades of research have found that there are a number of systemic disadvantages which contribute to the mass incarceration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, including the “disadvantage caused by a lack of education and low employment rates; inadequate housing, overcrowding and homelessness; poor health outcomes, including mental health, cognitive impairment including Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD) and physical disability; and alcohol and drug dependency and abuse.”8 It is our view that instead of addressing these systemic inequalities and drivers of criminalisation, the Cashless Welfare Card australia/contents/priority-populations/people-in-contact-with-the-criminal-justice- system#Alcohol%20consumption 5 Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Web Report, ‘Health of Australian Prisoners’ 2018, accessed: https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/prisoners/health-australia-prisoners-2018/contents/table-of-contents 6 Janet Hunt, Topical Issue No. 2/2020, Hunt Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research p 1 7 Sophie Trevitt of Change the Record, ‘Critical Condition’, May 2020 https://changetherecord.org.au/critical-condition 8 Australian Law Reform Commission, ‘Pathways to Justice–Inquiry into the Incarceration Rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples (ALRC Report 133) 28 March 2020 p 42 only exacerbates stigma, racial divisions, entrenches poverty and continues to deny Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples the support and services may they need and deserve. In NAAJA’s submission to the Cashless Welfare Card inquiry in 2019 it stated There is a real lack of employment opportunities for Aboriginal people living in remote communities. The barriers experienced by many Aboriginal people living remotely in relation to accessing education and training means that the small number of jobs that do exist may require formal prerequisites that many community members find difficult to meet. Territory wide, 14.2% of Aboriginal people have completed year 12, compared with 58.7% of non-Aboriginal Territorians. 25% of Aboriginal Territorians are unemployed, compared with 2.3% of non-Aboriginal people living in the NT. This lack of opportunity contributes to Aboriginal people in remote communities receiving social security benefits for prolonged periods of time, therefore often automatically falling within the current criteria for income management